Various news and items of importance to the audio and video podcasters and bloggers who are (or want to be) Hipcast.com customers.

Month: January 2007

It’s been a rocky road getting integrated with Google’s Blogger, and we’re almost out of the forest (we do not have a certificate from Google that ‘authenticates’ us, so there will be an error– we are waiting for Google on this one).

If you have received the following message:

Oops!System Error: Unable to connect to blog service (code: C — com.google.blogger.api.UserMigratedException: The given Blogger account has been migrated to a Google Account on the new Blogger).

This means that you have had your blog moved from the old Blogger to the new Blogger (going through Google Accounts, the all-Google authentication system, instead of your Blogger-only one).

It is the equivalent of starting a new blog.

How to fix it so you can post the flash video to Google:

1. Log in to your Hipcast.com account and click the BLOGS tab 2. Click ADD NEW BLOG 3. Select “Blogger BETA” from the drop-down list (the page will refresh) and enter a name for this listing in the “Service Name” field. 4. Click the button SAVE AND UPDATE

This will redirect you to Google’s site where you have to grant or refuse access. Choose GRANT ACCESS.

Note: There WILL be an error message from Google: “This website has not registered with Google to establish a secure connection for authorization requests. We recommend that you continue the process only if you trust the following destination:

http://www.hipcast.com/members/blog/blog_edit.htm

”

We are waiting for Google to get the certificate that treats Hipcast as a trusted source.

After you GRANT ACCESS, you’ll be returned to the page that lists your blogs.If you are not returned to the blog list page and are returned to the ADD BLOG page, you will need to migrate your Blogger account into a Google Blogger Account

Important: Your blog ID numbers will be new, and the style and design of your audio and video players, preferences etc, will need to be recreated from scratch. As mentioned above, the manner in which Google changed their system, results in the new Google Blogs being treated as a new blog altogether. It’s a one time inconvenience.

Audio and video files are night affected as they are tied to your account, not the blog.

Thanks for sticking with us through this, it’s been quite the cat and mouse game getting these two systems talking, and we’ve been wanting to be able to get a rock solid answer there as much as our Hipcast/Blogger customers have.

— It appears that Hipcast customers were momentarily unable to post to their Typepad blogs today. We are investigating the cause.

When posting to a blog system is normal for a long period of time and there’s an unexpected interruption in service (ie., no changes are made to your account), it’s generally due to either a network hiccup or the service is unreachable. If Typepad had suffered any downtime today, it would be invisible to Hipcast and postings would naturally fail.

We’ve got some long-awaited updates coming this week and in the following weeks. Here’s a breakdown of the various updates:

The new Blogger system – Google recently took the new Blogger out of beta and is requiring blogspot/blogger users to upgrade, resulting in a break in Hipcast-to-Blogger communications. This has taken longer than expected for us to update and we sincerely apologize for the delays and backlog in getting to these support e-mails– we’ve certainly heard you!

A little background about how blog posting works and has worked in the past: When you add a blog to your Hipcast account, you are asked for your username and password and the name of the blog service (and in some cases, the XMLRPC url which is required to talk to the blog software). This is how almost all the blog services operate: Typepad, WordPress (.com and installed versions), MoveableType, LiveJournal, etc. It’s a one-two-done process. (We publish over XMLRPC and support the MetaWeblogAPI and the older BloggerAPI)

The change to Blogger was implemented by Google so that adding a Blogger/Blogspot blog requires that authentication is re-routed through Google Accounts. This improves security for Blogger users, yet could possibly slow down the process for third party services like Hipcast in publishing as smoothly as we do to WordPress, Typepad, and others.

We expect to have new Blogger compatibility pushed live on the 10th or 11th of January.

Caller ID bypass – We’ve had requests for this feature and we’ll be pushing this live in the next couple weeks. If you call Hipcast via phone to record and publish audio, you’ll be able to be authenticated via caller ID if you choose.

Stats/Graphs improvements – Statistics are the lifeblood for many podcasters and we’ll be releasing improved stats and graph functionality to enable you to get a clearer picture of traffic for your podcast and files. We anticipate this will be live in the next couple weeks as well.